Brute Force isn’t exactly second-tier Jules Dassin but it’s one of his ground-rule doubles, I think. It suggests that prisoners were a lot more worldly and refined back in 1947, essentially decent fellows who happened to draw bad cards, and I’m not sure how valid that is. “Not having intimate knowledge of prisons or prisoners, we wouldn’t know whether the average American convict is so cruelly victimized as are the principal prison inmates in Brute Force, which came to Loew’s Criterion yesterday. But to judge by this ‘big house’ melodrama, the poor chaps who languish in our jails are miserably and viciously mistreated and their jailers are either weaklings or brutes.” — from Bosley Crowther‘s 7.17.47 N.Y. Times review.
